5 Easy Ways to Automate and Improve Your UA For The Holidays

Jon BurgDec 04, 2017

With millions of new phones and tablets ready to be unwrapped, the holidays are prime season for mobile marketers. However, balancing work pressure and holiday cheer isn’t easy. The kids are playing in the other room, the adults are having a good laugh, and you are stuck in the home office (which is now a guest bedroom) tweaking your UA and retargeting campaigns. This year, we want to give you back that holiday joy.

Here are 5 tips we gathered from leading advertisers, for how you can lighten your workload over the busy holiday season.

Manually syncing your user segments to ad networks, audience platforms and push messaging providers takes a lot of time and manual effort. Audiences makes this easy. Simply define your user segments (e.g. installed in the last seven days, completed tutorial and had no purchase activity), and select the partners to whom you would like to send these segments. Your Audiences will then be automatically synced to your preferred providers for use in lookalike targeting, user journey optimization, retargeting and more.

We recommend that you define and test your target Audiences in advance, setting up your Audiences on both the AppsFlyer-side and related campaigns on the partner side. Audiences will continue to update based on new installs and engagement, so you can spend less time over the holidays manually syncing and uploading user lists, and more time improving your performance or even better, more time with friends and family.

Tip 2: Let Live Alerts Monitor Your Performance

When time is limited, Live Alerts are a great way to monitor your KPIs. Simply select your desired criteria (e.g. 10% decrease in conversion rate), which team members should be notified, and how you would like to notify them (via email, Slack or even our mobile app). Let us keep an eye on your KPIs, so you can get back to your holiday celebrations.

Start setting up your Live Alerts a week or two before people start checking out for the holidays, so you can be sure everyone is receiving the right daily insights.

Tip 3: Automate Your Fraud Protection

Unfortunately, fraudsters do not take the holidays off. In fact, fraud rates are fairly steady across the year, suggesting that many fraudsters will ramp up their activities to cash in on the holiday season. There are number of ways you can use Protect360 to protect your spend over the holidays.

Set Fraud Terms in AdvanceUse IO Builder: Fraud Appendix to define your fraud terms. Include these terms in all of your contracts to avoid the hassle of reconciliation negotiations at the end of the billing cycle.

Setup Protect360If you haven’t already done so, talk to your success manager of sales representative about Protect360. Protect360 delivers enterprise-grade mobile fraud protection by using a unique, multi-layered approach to both proactively block all known fraud, and detect suspected fraud in real-time. With over half of all fraud hiding behind DeviceID Reset Marathons, Protect360 is the only solution in the world to this growing challenge.

Enable Transparent Protect360 ReportingProtect360 allows advertisers to enable transparent fraud reporting to networks and partners. When enabled, this allows your partners to see Protect360’s analysis of their traffic. This is a great way for partners to catch problematic traffic sources, and send only legitimate, high-quality traffic for your campaigns.

If you did not previously have this feature enabled, be sure to notify your partners that you have enabled these insights. They will love you for it. Call it a holiday gift!

Tip 4: Set up Validation Rules and Check-In Daily

Validation Rules are a great way to limit your attributed traffic, minimizing the cost and loss of installs that don’t meet your targeting parameters. For example, if all of your campaigns with a specific network are targeting iOS users in the US, set a Validation Rule to block attribution of any non-iOS and non-US traffic. We recommend regularly checking blocked traffic in Validation Rules and flagging any alarming trends to partners.

OneLink is a simple, very powerful tool. This single link will send every user to the right place, across every platform, every time. Ideal for your owned and earned media (e.g. social media posts, email, sms campaigns), OneLink will automatically detect what platform the user is on, if the app is installed, their geolocation, and deliver the optimal experience for every user.

When you are short on time or resources, OneLink is the ultimate growth hack.

For example, an iPhone X user who clicked on an ad for Vacations in Aruba and doesn’t yet have your app installed, will be brought to The App Store. On first-launch, the app will show the user Vacations in Aruba, delivering a seamless, optimized user experience.

Bonus: Download The AppsFlyer Mobile App To Check-In On The Go

Whether you are spending the holidays close to home, or heading out to a very special destination, taking out your laptop is a great way to pull yourself away from friends, family and holiday celebrations. The AppsFlyer Mobile App (for iOS and Android) is a great way sneak a peek at your performance data on-the-go, and send any action items to your team (or even yourself!) for follow-up.

To learn more about any of the features in this post, be sure to book some time with your success manager or schedule your AppsFlyer demo before the holiday rush. We look forward to speaking with you!

About Jon Burg

Jon is a seasoned marketer with 15 years experience in communications, customer experience and product innovation. While working agency side, Jon led marketing innovation and social product development for a number of Fortune 500 brands.